In 1957, the New York Times published a series of glowing stories about a young Cuban rebel named Fidel Castro – coverage that elevated his profile, gave him credibility abroad and helped propel his rise to power.

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Two years later, in a triumphant visit to New York City, Castro claimed he had fooled the Times reporter sent to interview him as he and his 18 men hid in the mountains.

As the Miami Herald put it in its obituary of Castro, who died on Saturday at the age of 90, the meeting with Times correspondent Herbert Matthews was Castro’s “greatest ploy”.

“Though the rebels had barely 20 bedraggled men, Castro marched the same group past Matthews several times and also staged the arrival of ‘messengers’ reporting the movement of other (nonexistent) units,” the Herald wrote.

“Matthews, convinced Castro controlled a huge army, wrote: ‘From the look of things, General Batista cannot possibly hope to suppress the Castro revolt.’ A wave of favorable coverage followed in the foreign press.”

As Americans continue to reckon with the impact of “fake news” on the 2016 election, that irresistible anecdote of Castro’s trickery resonated with journalists and conservative commentators who saw it, variously, as a great exploit, a half-century-old example of such “fake news” or yet more proof of liberal media bias.

The problem is that the story of Castro’s brilliant duplicity may not be true.

The source for the story is Castro himself, “the one person who most benefits from it” and a leader notorious for touting his own genius, said Anthony DePalma, a former New York Times correspondent who wrote a biography of Matthews.

Fifteen years ago, DePalma was assigned to write Castro’s New York Times obituary. He knew he had to reckon with Matthews’ troubled legacy of pro-Castro reporting. His research turned into a full biography. DePalma is certain that the correspondent was “guilty of sloppy reporting”.

“Duped? Mmmm, not so sure,” he said, adding: “The story of him duping Matthews is so much better than the truth.”

DePalma has long been skeptical. A rebel leader tried to play the same trick on him during the 1994 Chiapas conflict in Mexico, he said, marching a series of soldiers onstage and off again in front of a packed crowd of journalists. DePalma said he saw through the ploy easily: he spotted the same soldiers walk by twice, including one with a green bandana tucked in his back pocket.

Matthews “was a seasoned foreign correspondent”, DePalma said. “The idea of his being fooled by such a trick just didn’t seem right.”

DePalma never found an instance where Matthews claimed Castro had lied about the incident. But when he went to Cuba, there was “no evidence I found that it happened, and lots of reasons to suspect that it didn’t”.

Along with those 18 fighters, “dozens” of urban Castro supporters were reported visiting the mountains when DePalma interviewed Castro. Based on the reporter’s notes, Matthews’ overestimation of the size of Castro’s support may have been more influenced by what sources told him during a week of reporting in Havana.

In the end, DePalma’s New York Times obituary of Castro described Matthews’ historic interview but did not tackle the question of whether the correspondent had been fooled.

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What isn’t murky is the impact Matthews’ pro-Castro reporting had on Castro’s rise to power and on the Cuban people. Che Guevara “said that Matthews’s work was more important to the rebels than a victory on the battlefield”, DePalma wrote. Castro gave Matthews and other journalists medals of honor in 1959.

The New York Times has done some public reckoning with Walter Duranty’s pro-Stalin reporting on the Soviet Union in the 1930s. It has not yet reckoned with the impact of Matthews’ reporting on Cuba. DePalma, now a writer-in-residence at Seton Hall University, said he did not expect that it would.